A wireless mesh network is a communication network made up of radio nodes which provide two or more communication pathways per node. The wireless mesh network can provide multiple paths using the radio nodes which work as relay nodes or hops between a source and a destination. Each radio node can be a laptop, personal computer, Wi-Fi telephone, IP appliance, or any other electronic device having wireless capability. Since each node of the wireless mesh network is wirelessly connected to several other nodes, software or hardware failure to a certain node can be alleviated by a neighboring node to create an alternative route.
The wireless mesh network is often used to improve the reliability of a signal transmitted between the source and the destination by utilizing the multiple paths between them. In a traditional wireless mesh network communication protocol, an identical signal is transmitted from multiple sources using different time slots (e.g., using a time division multiplexing) to multiple destinations. Although the traditional protocol can improve the signal reliability, it consumes additional network resources, such as extra devices or components required for implementing the redundant sources and/or destinations.
Alternatively, the traditional protocol can be used to transmit different signals (e.g., data packets) from the multiple sources using the multiple paths. However, because of the possible interference between adjacent sources, different sources need to transmit their signals in a time-division way. This decreases the system throughput.